The Butterfly Effect

Edward Lorenz, The Butterfly Effect

       When Foster, a bachelor, late in his career moved to that section of the country that had the reputation of being notoriously backward, a national joke, depicted in the movies and on the radio as the source of unending amusement if not hilarity, he did not know what to expect. How much of it was true, how much urban prejudice? He moved to Hedgewater Creek only because the position he had accepted at the Snidely Foundation,  however much it might be a step down socially and culturally, was a step up professionally and financially. It was a step he compulsively felt he had to take to complete his professional career cycle. That was how he viewed it. A career cycle. Why come so far professionally in life and not take the last step? Once his three year contract was up, he could clear out, and retire to some idyllic spot where he could pursue his study of the Butterfly Effect. He had been bitten by the butterfly bug as a ten-year-old  and had never gotten over it. He  got hooked on lepidoptera the way some kids did on cigarettes or drugs.  He couldn’t for the life of him remember people’s names, but he unfailingly remembered the tongue-twisting latinate names of the lepidoptera groups, the clades and nesting clades, of butterflies.

       The Snidely family  had offered him the directorship of the Snidely Foundation sight unseen. So he had returned the vote of confidence by not visiting the town or meeting the Snidelys before accepting the position, adopting the “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” philosophy.

       “Welcome to Hedgewater Creek, Mr. Foster,” the mayor of the town greeted him at the railroad station the overcast day he stepped off the train, the only passenger to do so. Foster had noticed as the train pulled into the Hedgewater Creek station that there was a sign under the one with the name of the town which read, “Where Southern Hospitality Begins.” Perhaps that slogan, which he later learned was the town’s official motto, explained the mayor greeting him at the station, though it wouldn’t explain the eeriness of the station.

       “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Foster responded to the mayor’s greeting.  Foster’s terrible memory for the names of people had only gotten worse with age, so he took to adopting  or creating generic names or titles for people.  Foster had expected to be met at the station by at least one of the Snidely sisters, a wing of whose “mansion,” as they called it, he would be renting,  but there was no woman, no other person, anywhere on the platform. The mayor looked and sounded like Paul Ford, the comic actor who had had a long career on television  playing incompetent blowhards. The mayor’s striking resemblance to Ford and the eerie emptiness of the platform had made Foster suddenly feel the  late career move he was making was not really happening, that he was dreaming or even worse that he was awake but trapped in one of Paul Ford’s long running television shows. It was odd trains of thought  like this that made Foster wonder at times if he was slipping into Alzheimer’s as his younger brother had.

       As if if reading his  mind, the mayor said, “Gertrude was going to join me, but something came up  that she had to deal with. She sends her apologies.” Foster tried to remember which of the sisters he had talked to on the phone was Gertrude. Was she the oldest, the youngest  or the middle sister? He was glad to be reminded by the mayor what her name was, whichever one she was, because he had already forgotten the first names of the other two. “She asked me to drive you to the Snidely mansion,” the mayor said, relieving Foster of the luggage he was carrying. “Did you bring anything else?”  

       “I have a trunk that will be shipped later,” Foster explained. In what other the region of the country, Foster wondered, would the mayor carry your luggage and chauffeur you from the railroad station to your destination? 

       At the mansion the Mayor introduced him to the three sisters, Gertrude, the oldest; Floppy,  as Florence the youngest was nicknamed; and Gwendolyn, the middle sister. All three were spinsters. None of them were unattractive, but they were very pale, rather ethereal, to put if politely, bloodless to put it bluntly. They had had a younger brother, but he had been kidnapped, or so the sisters had believed. The Snidely Foundation had so much money that they thought it inevitable that a Snidely would eventually be kidnapped for ransom. The five-year-old Phillip had been playing in the sandbox in the backyard of the mansion when Gertrude, who was watching over him, had run into the house when she remembered she hadn’t turned the oven on to roast the duck they were going to have for dinner that evening. As she was turning  on the stove, the telephone rang. It was Gwen who was downtown who wanted to know how many yards of muslin Gertrude wanted them to buy because Floppy couldn’t remember. Then Floppy got on the phone to tell Gertrude she had just seen Elaine Dewey, the girl who had fled town five  years earlier when she was pregnant, and her oldest brother was rumored to be the father. Gertrude later claimed she hadn’t left little Phillip  at the  most for five minutes, but when  she went out, he wasn’t in the sandbox. In a panic, she ran in wider and wider circles, calling him, at first anxiously and then hysterically.

       The stagnant creek near the mansion was dragged twice and the twenty acres of scraggly woods surrounding the creek had been thoroughly gone over by the troop of local Boy Scouts, led by their scoutmaster, a young Baptist minister. No trace of the boy had ever been found. The ransom note the Snidelys had expected to receive had never arrived.

        But the first time he was in the Snidely parlor, on the day that was the missing Phillip’s birthday,  Foster saw what resembled a shrine in one corner of the room where a candle on a table burned reverentially.  On the wall were framed photographs of Snidely kin, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, most of the clan, dating far back, and at the center was a  framed chiaroscouro photo, perhaps taken with an old family camera, of the missing Phillip. Foster got as close as he could, because there was something about the photo, in the dim light,  that made his scalp tingle and his heart beat.

       

       Foster couldn’t get to sleep that night. Phillip in the photo looked exactly like him at that age. He still had the photo of himself in a trunk, but he was reluctant to take it out because then he was afraid he would never get back to sleep. He had had a rare, childhood disease and had been in and out of hospitals from the age of three to five. Those years were a blur to him and in his mixed-up state of mind he suspected he and Phillip had got mixed up in the hospital at birth, notwithstanding their wide difference in ages.

       His train of thought got so outlandish, so bizarre that he returned not to his previous idea that it was a dream but instead he was a character in a stupid unbelievable short story written by a talentless, rank amateur who didn’t know what the hell he or she was doing, and that there ought to be  a law requiring aspiring fiction story writers to get a license, after following some kind of instruction or schooling, before they could begin  trying to create credible people and places and plots with beginnings and endings, fiction that creates not so much the illusion as the essence of reality. Barbers and heart surgeons, plumbers and airplane pilots have to get licenses. Why not writers of fiction? Writers of fiction are like God. In the beginning there is nothing, a void, and the writer creates a world that he should people with credible characters who live and breathe, who love and suffer, who capture the imagination of readers, interesting  and inspiring, uplifting and enlightening them.

       In today’s fast, frantic world, where  time is of the essence, when global warming is breathing down our necks, the frying of  the planet being  only decades away,  it is not the long-winded who are invaluable, however profound and gifted they may be. Who has the time and patience for War and Peace? Only the rare and the privileged. It is the time not for Tolstoy, but for Chekhov. 

       Yes, Paris is a beautiful city to be creative in, but most people, especially most Americans, live in Podunk. Most Americans  are as exiled from culture as Ovid was from Rome. This is not the time for long love letters. For the lonely living  lives of quiet desperation, an “I love you” note will do. If you can’t find the road back to the Athens of America, make do with Appalachia.

       A little can mean a lot. The Butterfly Effect means that a small change can lead to great changes. A butterfly flapping its wings two weeks earlier can help create, can contribute to, a hurricane. This is the case in any dynamical situation, not just in the weather.

       Get out of the cycle of career advancement. Stop spinning in circles. You will be dead for a very long time, you will be dead infinitely, though religious hucksters sell heaven as a nostrum. So make the most of time, not by making money, but by making haste to get out of the rut of routine. Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”